Tuesday, 13 August 2013

A
woman from Maryland, USA, got one shock after being bitten by a snake.
But soon she was shocked for the second time, as she received $55,000
medical bill.

Jules
Weiss had stopped to take a photo at an overlook along the George
Washington Parkway. On the way back to her car, she felt something bite
her.

“It felt just like a bee sting,” Weiss told the local newsmen from NBC4. “There were two fang marks with liquid coming out.”

Jules
Weiss, the former emergency medical technician, had suffered a
copperhead snake bite. Within an hour, she said, her foot turned
“grayish” and started to swell.

She
addressed the Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., where she received
three IV bags of antivenom over 18 hours. Then, the scary part: a
whopping $55,000 bill for treatment.

“It’s
not a number I can really wrap my head around,” Weiss said. Health
insurance would bring the cost down to a few hundred dollars. But the
woman’s insurance had just lapsed. Antivenom involves milking individual
snakes and is a costly treatment.

The Bethesda Hospital told the newsmen from NBC4 it can cost as much as $40,000 to get the antivenom.

That’s
not the only costly treatment for an animal attack: Last year, a woman
in Arizona stung by a scorpion received a bill of $83,000 for the
antivenom treatment – a staggering cost of $40,000 a dose. Even after
insurance, Marcie Edmonds still owed the hospital $25,000.ic $55,000 for
Treatment.